Friday, November 29, 2013

This remarkably empty-headed article appeared quoting extensively from Canadian research in TIME Online recently. The comments are the best part as they have easily deconstructed most of the arguments presented.

But it also seems to me to be a Feminist assault on the fairly well documented data that suggests Canadian Healthcare is facing a "manpower" shortage as the increasing number of female doctors can't keep up with the workload left behind by all the old retiring male docs.

There have been other attempts - but I find them unconvincing (again look at the commentary to see some of the best rebuttals of the articles main points - mostly it's apples to oranges).

In a recent case where a man killed a EPS police dog received OVERWHELMING feedback and support - and the Federal government has already moved to frame a new addition to the Criminal Code called "Quanto's Law" that calls for anyone "who knowingly or recklessly poisons, injures or kills a law enforcement animal,” including a horse or dog" a maximum 5-yr penalty.

Then how is it possible that our Federal Government can move so quickly on legislation in situations like this? Equal Parenting has not received such rapid attention - but police dogs and gay tourists have instantly.

Monday, November 18, 2013

Paglia believes we it is naive to think the ascent of women will accomplish any more than previous governments and all that will happen is we will become a Nanny State. Education especially deprives boys/male initiative and curbs their self-identity/esteem. It is no surprise that the subjugation of women under Jihidist culture represents a dark shadow for modern western culture.

I hate Maureen Dowd - and Hanna Rosin.

Here is a thought. While these self-congratulating women project their insouciant superiority as privileged white women. But in truth Western Women are failing miserably at their divine mission - raising well adjusted families. And they are no happier to boot.

Since marriage reduces the chance that a child will be poor by 80 percent, training for marriage should be a key part of a church's outreach to the poor. "We need to be helping cultivate the skills for marriage in communities that are in need."

Hymowitz argued that the decline in marriage has cultivated a new "caste society," where a child's future social status is determined by the relationship between his mother and father. She said what attracted her to the issue of marriage decay was its connection to "poverty and inequality."

The major story "is less the rise of women and more the fall of low-income, less-educated men," said blogger Cathy Reisenwitz. With the decline of manufacturing, more men struggle to make a living and provide for their families. "Women are taking the lead in their own lives because they have to."

The downfall of marriage "leads to women and men being less well-off economically and in every other way as well." She tied the uptick in mental health problems among children to the increase of divorce and the decline of men and women tying the knot. "Suicide, violence, depression, those things are directly attributable to the collapse of the marriage culture."

Sunday, November 10, 2013

In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on row,That mark our place; and in the skyThe larks, still bravely singing, flyScarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days agoWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,Loved, and were loved, and now we lieIn Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:To you from failing hands we throwThe torch; be yours to hold it high.If ye break faith with us who dieWe shall not sleep, though poppies growIn Flanders fields.

=====================================================================One of the most asked questions is: why poppies? The answer is simple: poppies only flower in rooted up soil. Their seeds can lie on the ground for years and years, and only when someone roots up the ground, they will sprout. There was enough rooted up soil on the battlefield of the Western Front; in fact the whole front consisted of churned up soil. So in May 1915, when McCrae wrote his poem, around him poppies blossomed like no one had ever seen before.

As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, Major McCrae, who had joined the McGill faculty in 1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto, had spent seventeen days treating injured men -- Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans -- in the Ypres salient.

It had been an ordeal that he had hardly thought possible. McCrae later wrote of it:

'I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done.'

One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain.

The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station beside the Yser Canal, just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry.

In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook.

A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly. 'His face was very tired but calm as we wrote,' Allinson recalled. 'He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer's grave.'

When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO. Allinson was moved by what he read:

'The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.' In fact, it was very nearly not published. Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England.

The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but Punch published it on 8 December 1915: